Four USB Flash Drives from A-Data with 4GB Storage Capacity. Page 7

For our today’s article we picked four USB flash drives with 4GB storage capacity from A-Data Company. WE are going to check out their performance compared against other 4GB solutions available in the market and see how well they cope with Windows Vista ReadyBoost function.

Performance in FC-Test 1.0

FC-Test will help us examine the flash drives under real-life conditions. As usual we will use two versions of this test utility, although the second one is more precise. However, we need to be able to compare today’s results with those obtained before we developed FC-test 2.0.

Let me remind you once again how this program works. The program writes and reads a few file-sets of certain size and number of files and measures the time it takes to perform each operation. This helps calculate the speed of the drive and see how it depends on the number and size of the processed files.

In our case we use three file-sets. They differ in file size (1, 10 and 100MB) and number of files (1, 10, and 100) from one another. Practice suggests that a 100MB file is large enough to reveal the maximum performance of a USB flash drive and using a larger file doesn’t affect the results much.

The first diagram shows the write speed for 100 files 1MB each. PD14 and PD15 drives proved evident outsiders as their results are the lowest of all the tested drives. The fastest of the four is RB15 although it is still pretty far behind the leaders. This drive, as well as PD3 can be called a confident average performer.

When we read 100 1MB files, the picture is more systematic. RB15 and PD3 again proved to be the fastest of the four A-Data products tested today. However, their performance is pretty average against the background of other solutions. PD15 remained an outsider having taken the last but one spot.

When the file size increases to 10MB, all of our main testing participants managed to improve their performance, although it didn’t really pay back in general: most of their competitors boosted their performance even higher. As a result, our heroes took the lower part of the ranking chart, with PD14 and PD15 falling considerably behind the others.

Reading 10 files 10MB each doesn’t change anything in the situation. RB15 and PD3 perform very closely and rest in the middle of the chart. PD14 yields a little to them, while PD15 again turned out almost the last.

When the size of the test file increased to 100MB, all four flash drives again improved their write speed. But again, it doesn’t change the picture: all four are in the bottom part of the chart.

The results of RB15 and PD3 are identical again during reading of a 100MB file. They took the middle spots on the chart. The PD14 is just a little behind them. the slowest of the four here is again the PD15: it appeared almost 1.5 times slower than the other in this test.